oh com'n. As if twitter doesn't allow people to post stupid junk? Multiple accounts that posted "Kill all white women" "Today seems like a good day for another reminder that all republicans deserve to die" are still active along with plenty of other insane things. You can cherry pick bad stuff from any social media site.
Twitter puts an active effort into removing those posts. You can definitely make the case they don’t go far enough, but Parler did the bare minimum. You would have to cherry pick the reasonable content off that site.
Not only did twitter end up removing it, but it was a hashtag in response to a video from the protests of people yelling “Hang Mike Pence”, primarily not people actually calling for Mike Pence to be hanged. That I keep seeing this example being thrown around from conservative sources shows either a desire to argue in bad faith or a complete inability to research things beyond the absolute surface level. And it’s not like there aren’t other examples one could use to make reasonable complaints about censorship bias on twitter.
In fairness, I don't have a habit of applying tight scrutiny to things that appear, on their face, to be blatant calls to violence. It's usually self-evident by reading the words.
Twitter's actions aren't even self-consistent here. If these tweets were all innocuous, then why remove the trend? If they were primarily discussions of other people's activity, rather than explicit calls for violence, then there was no good reason to do this.
Also, there's nothing "moving goal posts" about asking people to at least try to substantiate what they post. The person I responded to didn't even bother posting a link.
"Hang Mike Pence", as has been noted many times, was trending because people were discussing the videos showing Trump rioters chanting that.
People were not banned for using that phrase for the same reason you and I are not going to be banned/flagged for using it here: we aren't calling for violence and murder.
edit: previously called this a bad-faith argument, but that's not fair.
A big problem on social networks (including right here on HN) is that it's very easy for people to behave disingenuously and ask questions to which they already know the answer.It's a very effective wayt o either spread misinformation or steal the time of people who are concerned about misinformation, because it's much cheaper to repeat a BS allegation than it is to debunk it.
Another problem (more peculiar but not unique to HN) is that calling out such behavior is often regarded as uncivil. To my mind disingenuity is far more uncivil; I prefer a rude truth to a polite lie.
Yet another problem is the common willful conflation of simply being wrong with bad faith or disingenuity. People generally won't correct themselves if they know they're going to get screamed at or dogpiled either way.
That's a lesser problem, because people who get something wrong once are typically fine with being corrected, and contrariwise people are unlikely to dogpile someone for making a single mistake.
Examples of disingenuity include people asking naive-seeming questions to which those same people have already received detailed answers in the past, or repeating factual assertions that they made previously and which were shown and acknowledged to be false. It's not so common on HN but sadly very common on big social media sites or on news commenting platforms like disqus.
If people are required to upload official identification before posting, why would you not want this site up? It seems like a low-effort honeypot by the FBI. Let all the radicalized people come, easily tie their online & offline identities together, then monitor them.
A friend of mine got permanently suspended from twitter because she and a friend were bantering with each other and she made a joking threat. Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her.
Twitter regularly bans people for anything that smells of violence, even when the "threat" is one person joking with their friend.
Those two examples are likely rhetorical and are (as far as I can tell) not intended to and extremely unlikely to incite violence, much less imminent violence. If there were, however, organized groups actually planning and carrying out killings, and those groups used those slogans as a rallying cry, then indeed people and groups distributing those slogans ought to be banned from social networks.
